The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,377 out of 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. The Brides of Dracula
    Here is but another repetition of the standard tale of the vampire bugaboo who likes to sink his oversized dentures into the necks of pretty girls.There is nothing new or imaginative about it.
  2. Ocean's 11
    Lewis Milestone's direction suits the movement of Harry Brown's and Charles Lederer's script, which is entirely centripetal, focusing exclusively on Mr. Sinatra and his gang. Young people are likely to find this more appropriate and bewitching than do their elders. The latter are likely to feel less gleeful in the presence of heroes who rob and steal.
  3. The Time Machine
    The drama, for all its invention, is creaky and a bit passé. (Apparently there has still been no contact with other planets in 800,000 A. D.) And the mood, while delicately wistful, is not so flippant or droll as it might be in a fiction as fanciful and flighty as this one naturally is.
  4. Inherit the Wind
    One of the most intelligent, respectable and entertaining motion pictures of this year.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bellboy
    A generous—some might even say gratuitous—proportion of the anecdotes are devoted to mild shaggy dog jokes, with a subdued audience chuckle as the kindest response. Mr. Lewis' devotees may find the comedian disappointingly restrained.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    13 Ghosts
    It's too bad Mr. Castle, in serving up his ghosts, didn't simply have some cartoonists draw, 'em on in full view.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darby O'Gill and the Little People
    Overpoweringly charming concoction of standard Gaelic tall stories, fantasy and romance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    House of Usher
    Under the low-budget circumstances, Vincent Price and Myrna Fahey should not be blamed for portraying the decadent Ushers with arch affectation, nor Mark Damon held to account for the traces of Brooklynese that creep into his stiffly costumed impersonation of the mystified interloper.
  9. The Apartment
    Mr. Wilder has done more than write the film. His direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pollyanna
    Like its sub-teen, "Glad Girl" heroine, this visit with Pollyanna is pleasant and unlikely to hurt or excite even the small fry.
  11. Private Property
    This tense and upsetting film has more psychological depth and empathy than the comparable sensationalist fare of its time, and shudder-inducing cinematic style to spare. Private Property qualifies as a genuine rediscovery.
  12. The Cranes Are Flying
    Thanks to Mr. Kalatozov's direction and the excellent performance Tatyana Samoilova gives as the girl, one absorbs a tremendous feeling of sympathy from this film—a feeling that has no awareness of geographical or political bounds.
  13. Suddenly, Last Summer
    Joseph L. Mankiewicz' direction is strained and sluggish, as is, indeed, the whole conceit of the drama. It should have been left to the off-Broadway stage.
  14. On the Beach
    Mr. Kramer has brilliantly directed a strong and responsive cast, headed by Gregory Peck as the submarine commander and Ava Gardner as the worldly woman who craves his love. Miss Gardner is remarkably revealing of the pathos of a wasted life. Fred Astaire is also amazing as the cynical scientist, conveying in his self-effacing manner a piercing sense of the irony of his trade.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mummy
    For a superior version of a nearly identical horror yarn, with a little style and imagination, catch the 1932 Boris Karloff version of The Mummy now floating around on television. The new one just lumbers.
  16. Ben-Hur
    The artistic quality and taste of Mr. Wyler have prevailed to make this a rich and glowing drama that far transcends the bounds of spectacle. His big scenes are brilliant and dramatic—that is unquestionable. There has seldom been anything in movies to compare with this picture's chariot race.
  17. Shadows
    Shadows is an unfinished picture in every sense of the word. Yet it is fitfully dynamic, endowed with a raw but vibrant strength, conveying an illusion of being a record of real people, and it is incontestably sincere.
  18. Pillow Talk
    One of the most lively and up-to-date comedy-romances of the year.
  19. Look Back in Anger
    The fury and hate that John Osborne was able to pack into a flow of violent words in his stage play, Look Back in Anger, are not only matched but also documented in the film that the original stage director, Tony Richardson, has made from that vicious play.
  20. The Magician
    This picture is full of extraordinary thrills that flow and collide on several levels of emotion and intellect. And it swarms with sufficient melodrama of the blood-chilling, flesh-creeping sort to tingle the hide of the least brainy addict of out-right monster films.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    North by Northwest
    The lines and the expert manipulation of the principals are tributes to the outstanding talents of Messrs. Lehman and Hitchcock.
  22. The Nun's Story
    From Kathryn Hulme's novel The Nun's Story, which gives an amazing account of a young Belgian woman's experiences in becoming and being a nursing nun, screen writer Robert Anderson and director Fred Zinnemann have derived an equally amazing motion picture of an extraordinary dedicated life.
  23. Anatomy of a Murder
    It is the best courtroom melodrama this old judge has ever seen.
  24. Porgy and Bess
    Almost a quarter of a century after its initial performance on the stage (and seventeen years after the revival that really established it), this most haunting of American musical dramas has been transmitted on the screen in a way that does justice to its values and almost compensates for the long wait.
  25. Wild Strawberries
    This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.
  26. Too Many Crooks
    Too Many Crooks is strictly of that surface order, but it's a good, crazy, brisk farce comedy.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rio Bravo
    Despite its slickness, virility, occasional humor and, if it may be repeated, authentic professional approach, it is well-made but awfully familiar fare.
  28. Room at the Top
    Room at the Top is quite conservative in its morality — although its sledgehammer ending still packs an emotional wallop.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Some Like It Hot
    Let's face it. Two hours is too long a time to harp on one joke. But Billy Wilder, who produced, directed and collaborated with I. A. L. Diamond on this breeziest of scripts, proves once again that he is as professional as anyone in Hollywood. Mr. Wilder, abetted by such equally proficient operatives as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, surprisingly has developed a completely unbelievable plot into a broad farce in which authentically comic action vies with snappy and sophisticated dialogue.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    The picture races into a wild chase of a climax that is pure bunk.
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